Unconscious Biases In Psychology

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) I chose to take was the Race IAT test. It tests the users ability to associate with images of European Americans (white) and African Americans (black) as well as words that correspond to good and bad. The normative results are that most Americans tend to have some form of an automatic association with European Americans. My results were typical. I felt a little embarrassed at first in reaction to seeing the results of a slight automatic preference to European Americans. I even took the test again to see if I would be better prepared for it and the result remained the same.

Implicit bias is bias in one’s judgment or behavior that results from one’s unconscious associations. In order to thoroughly discuss implicit bias, implicit associations must first be examined. Implicit associations refer to one’s unconscious associations between a group and how one feels about said group. For example, a person may subconsciously associate straight people as “normal” and homosexuals as “wrong”. They may have this unconscious association even if they do not express this opinion

The Implicit Association Test or IAT is a valuable tool that those in the criminal justice system use; often times during the hiring process candidates will be required to complete the IAT so that hiring officials can see if they have any unconscious bias. The IAT is still relatively new in terms of psychological research only being created in the 1990’s by psychologist Anthony Greenwald (Kaufman, 2011). Individuals who take the race portion of the test are shown pictures of Caucasian and African-American males or females, then are given positive or negative words that they associate with each race as fast as possible. After taking the test it measures the unconscious bias that everyone has deep down (Kaufman, 2011).

Research centers for the study of racial bias have developed experimental studies to help understand how race can, for instance, influence a police officer to shoot an unarmed suspect. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most commonly used tests for this study. IAT was developed by three scientists, Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) (“ProjectImplicit”). Their “Project Implicit” program was designed to identify our societal biases through the association of faces (black and white) with words (good and bad). This program uses a scoring algorithm that can identify those who are faking the test with approximately 75% accuracy (Cvencek et al.).

The participants were 20 men and 60 women with ages ranging from 17 to 26. The participants were from different majors at Texas State University and were recruited from introductory psychology classes. The participants were 51% Caucasian, 38% Hispanic, 4% African American, and 7% other. The participants were not

The study consisted of fifty, female, undergraduate college students. The ethnicities that were use for this study were African American, European, Asian, Hispanic, biracial, and a very slight percentage was categorized as other. The experiment would begin at 5:00pm everyday, for four weeks. One of the three groups was administered each day. The three groups were either peppermint, expectation, or control. Each participant was seated down, given an instruction sheet, a laptop, and was not able to see the other participants from their view.

Introductory Psychology students (N = 305) from a mid-western university participated in the study online for course credit. Sixty-eight percent of the participants identified as female, 32% of the participants identified as male, and one participant did not indicate their gender. The majority of the participants were Caucasian (73%), and the average age of the participants was 19.04 (SD = 1.10).

The main purpose of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is to understand social cognition in individuals. Furthermore, the IAT measures individual differences in implicit attitudes, stereotypes, and self-esteem, which are an extension of its original use of intergroup attitudes. The IAT is used under several applications including clinical, developmental, marketing, health, legal, and its main usage involves implicit social cognition. Hundreds of studies of psychological processes have used the IAT and its measurements due to its success. The IAT’s development started through psychologists that created computer based measures of unconscious cognition after microcomputers made it possible to measure mental computation in milliseconds in the

The IAT results measure implicit attitudes and stereotypes towards a group of people. They also measure the bonding between the associations and concepts. For example, I was quick at categorizing when both European Americans

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one that attempts to detect implicit bias by asking test-takers to pair certain racial categories with deciding words like “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” In a test where “implicit bias against African-Americans is defined as faster responses when the "black" and "unpleasant" categories are paired than when the "black" and "pleasant” categories are paired,” “most people tend to prefer white to African American” (Jolls and Sunstein, 2006, p.971). The IAT also found that “scores on the IAT and similar tests are correlated with third parties' ratings of the degree of general friendliness individuals show to members of another race” (Jolls and Sunstein, 2006, p.972). If people associate certain negative traits

There are various tests related to race within the Implicit-Association Test (IAT) like Skin-tone IAT, Native IAT, Race IAT, Asian IAT, etc. The test I took was related to Race IAT opted to complete the African American – European American IAT. In the study, there were three questionnaires and a sorting task involving words and pictures. There was the time limit of 10 minutes. Before starting the test, demographics about my basic information were reported. There were various categories that I had to keep in mind before starting the test. The categories were Good, Bad, African American and European American. The test result helped me identify as colorblindness and also, slightly altered my identity.

The materials used for this study included PsychMate Student Version 2.0 (St. James, Walter Schneider and Amy Eschman.) Psychology Software Tools, Inc. Along with the PsychMate software, a computer provided by Queens College was used in order to successfully complete the study.

The first experiment conducted by Devine and colleagues conducted a well thought out experiment in terms of their technique. In all three studies the authors’ randomly assigned the participants to the experiments increasing the ability to generalize this sample to a larger population. In addition, the participants were asked to freely respond to the question, providing a more accurate knowledge of stereotypes because no cues were provided to influence the subjects’ knowledge. The anonymity of the participants also allows subjects to freely provide information without being judged resulting in an easier access to their private thoughts. Alternatively, in all three studies the authors recruited a number of white participants. This may produce bias in their results as stereotypes and prejudice towards blacks have historical roots in their culture. In the first study, the list of traits do not completely capture

The Implicit Association Test was established by Anthony Grenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek. This test assesses your attitude or views towards a certain subject, it is your automatic response on an unconscious level. The Test results you recieve may be the complete opposite of your conscious beliefs and views. You have two levels of thinking your conscious and unconscious level, in your conscious level you have your beliefs and values that control our behavior deliberately, then your unconscious level which is our immediate automatic response to something. The

The IAT is basically a test that gauges the strength of an individual’s implicit prejudices. The experimenter asks a participant to push corresponding buttons when a word or an image is projected on screen. They then measure the “association” speed (pushing the button) a participant make. According to Anthony Greenwald, “If two concepts are associated, it is easy to give the same response to exemplars…” (Erwin, 2007). So if an individual has a positive view of a certain group, it will be easy for the person to associate that group to positive words or concepts. If the person’s view of another group is negative, it will automatically associate it with negative concepts.